CAGD 470 - Locked in Sprint #1

 In CAGD 470 (Video Game Production), I was recruited into a group that wanted to make a first-person horror game in which a player is in a laboratory and trying to escape. At the same time, some monsters roam around, making the player’s journey difficult. The game will have various rooms and puzzles that will challenge the player. In the game's vision, enemies would roam the laboratory. The player would have to gather various items that will help them on their journey to escape the lab.

After getting an idea of the game, many key points and features came to my attention, including the player controller, enemy AI, Inventory System, and Crafting System. All those were going to be heavy tasks for this project. After discussing with the other members in the group, we concluded that the hardest feature to develop would be enemy AI since it needed to include multiple behaviors and enemy types, and we all had previous experience programming enemy AI. I took on the task of learning how to use enemy AI and having different enemies behave in various ways.

Most of this sprint involved researching how to do the enemy AI and, more importantly, researching the multiple pathfinding algorithms to see which one best suits each enemy. So, to start, I made an enemy following prototype using Unity’s nav mesh system, and after tweaking the enemy’s variables and adjusting the enemy following script.

After getting the primary enemy to follow the script, I wanted to switch my focus to making the enemy’s cards that would hold all the essential values for the designer for the game to tweak later. I knew multiple enemies would share variables like speed, spawn point, and base health. To solve this, I wanted to use Inheritance and Scriptable Objects, allowing the designer to make new scriptable Objects and then drag and drop them into their desired enemies.

 During this time, we also held our first meeting outside of class hours, and we managed to discuss a more accurate vision for the game and be all on the same page. Another topic discussed in the meeting was the multiple enemies and what they would do, so we came up with some basics, like the Grunt, who will always follow you at slow speeds, and the radioactive bug, which will ignore the player but wonder around, the mimic which will be transformed as an object and once the player approaches, it will start following the player and a hearing-sensitive enemy that will take the player’s microphone input. 

To finish this sprint, I started working on the Mimic, one of the most challenging enemies to develop. The basic logic for the mimic was for the enemy to wait, still morph into an object, and then transform into a monster once the player approaches the hearing radius. So, I first did a quick model with some primitives and made a broom. After that, I applied some colliders and added a rigid body so it could be pulled around. Finally, I made it into a prefab and applied that to the enemy’s base transform on the Player Mimic Card.

Overall, in this sprint, I researched what will be needed to develop the enemies. I would have hoped to have had more time to create more mechanics for the mimic. However, I needed a reference for the pathfinding, which will be the most challenging thing to do. Learning about pathfinding algorithms that enemies use to reach the player and damage. This sprint was good because we managed to get every group member on the same page and get the basic enemies figured out and how the player would get rid of them.